No one could do it now. Not with CCTV cameras everywhere, and DNA and e-mail.
It was the first thing I’d ever done well. I’d tried to make it the start of someone I could like. Sally. For a time I’d thought I’d won. But memories had grown in the dark silence until they’d devoured my sleep and my health.
He walked with me everywhere now, and his face hung over me as I lay in bed. I couldn’t forget the warmth in his dark eyes when I’d done something that pleased him, or their hardness when I’d failed.
He must have been lonely too. I can see that now. But then he’d seemed all-powerful, without feelings or fears or needs.
I turned my head away from the river. His voice sounded again, bumping around in my mind, as smooth and comforting as rich hot chocolate:
“Sometimes they say that only people who deserve it actually see the kingfisher, but I think that’s sentimental, Kim.”
“Then I am sentimental,” I said aloud to the space he’d once inhabited. “I don’t deserve it.”
I turned my back on the river and walked at last towards the rhubarb patch, where we’d had our last encounter. It was a mound, carefully sloped to make the water drain away so that it wouldn’t rot the crowns. How well I remembered the care he’d lavished on those red stalks and their poisonous yellowy-green leaves. Bending down over them, he went on talking to me even as he weeded around his acidic, horrible fruit.
“I know you’ll be legally free to go on your birthday, Kim. But you can’t. You may be nearly old enough, but you’re not fit to live alone. Not yet. One day, I’ll help you go. But for now you must stay here. And I...”
He’d never managed to say whatever it was he’d do because I’d raised the old iron bar like an axe above my head and brought it crashing down onto the back of his head and then his spine.
Now I looked at the scarlet stalks of rhubarb, asking the old questions that had come to torture me: Had he died at once? Who had found him? Could he have been saved? Why hadn’t they come after me?
Tyres squeaked on the paving, like something out of one of my nightmares of retribution. I thought of hiding, or climbing the wall into next-door’s garden. But I had to face it. I’d always known it would come. And better here than in Australia with Sam. At least Sam would never have to know who I really was, what I’d done. I turned to face it.
A wheelchair came to a stop just by the rhubarb bed. He raised his head, white-haired now, and stared right at me. His dark eyes were the same. His voice too:
“Thank God you’re safe, Kim.”
Copyright © 2012 by N.J. Cooper
The Suitcase
by Edward D. Hoch
Since 2008, when this magazine lost one of its greatest contributors, Edward D. Hoch, we’ve been presenting occasional reprints of stories he sold to other publications. Most of the stories have not been typical of the sort of work Ed Hoch did for EQMM. His work for us was predominantly in the classical vein — fairly clued whodunits with series characters readers came to know intimately. Over the past four years we’ve tried to show, through these reprints, Ed Hoch’s versatility. Here, for instance, we see that he was a master of the story with a twist in the tail.
The plane, a silver bird dipping its wings to the far-off dawn, came in low over Jason Lean’s farmland. Too low, he remembered thinking, for he’d seen so many hundreds on the airport approach that he almost at times felt he could fly one. Too low, with the rising sun in the pilot’s eyes and the double row of power lines crossing the tip of the hill. He shouted something, to be heard only by the field birds and the indifferent cows, then screwed his face in a sort of horror as the great plane touched the unseen wires.
There was a crackle of blue flame, no more than that of a match lit and suddenly dying, but it was enough to spell death to an airliner. The entire hillside seemed to explode as the plane twisted into the ground, boring deep like some hibernating animal, spewing flames that might have told you the animal was a dragon.
Jason Lean watched until the first flash of flame had died, and then began the short trek across the valley to the wreckage on the hillside. Others would have seen the crash too, he knew, and already it would be tapping out on the news tickers of the world. How many dead — fifty, sixty? Those big planes carried a lot of people these days. He shook his head sadly at the thought, but did not increase his pace. He already knew he would find nothing alive when he reached the smoldering wreckage.
Now here and there a tree was burning, and there ahead he could see the tail section of the plane itself, a great silver thing that sat silent now as a giant tombstone. Padded seats, so comfortable with their bodies still strapped sitting — grotesque, but all too real. And strewn across the landscape, wreckage, flesh, baggage, mail pouches, fallen trees, dangerously dangling wires. As if a giant hand — a flaming devil’s hand — had written its signature on the hillside. All dead, all.
He walked among them, terrified, remembering somewhere deep within the recesses of his mind a time when, very young, he’d walked through a country graveyard at night. He took in all the details of grief and tragedy, the spilled suitcases, the child’s toys, the scorched and splintered packing cases... and then his eyes fell on one suitcase, resting apart from the others, its leather hide barely marked by the smoke.
It was a large bag, of pale pebbled pigskin, with two tough straps around it to reinforce the lock. It was the only one he saw that had neither burned nor tumbled open to spread its contents over the landscape. Jason Lean stood for some moments staring at the bag, as if it held some strange sort of fascination for him. Then, in an instant of certainty, he stood and grasped the plastic handle, lifting the suitcase from the ground. He turned once to look over his shoulder, to make certain that none of the blackened corpses moved in accusation. Then he hurried back down the hillside, through the smoky haze of destruction, carrying his treasure like some traveler only just returned from a world tour.
“A plane crash,” Martha said when he returned. “What a terrible thing!”
“Terrible,” Jason agreed. He always agreed with his wife. “I was over there, looking at the wreckage. They’re all dead.” Already, on the distant ridge, they could see men moving like ants. Police, ambulances, morgue wagons, reporters — all converging now on the scene of disaster. Making their way carefully around the fallen wires and the blackened wreckage. Hoping, then feeling hope die as they saw what Jason Lean had seen.
“What’s that you’ve got?” she asked, noticing the suitcase for the first time.
“I found it up by the wreckage. It’s not burned or anything. Must have been thrown clear.”
“And you took it?” She made the words into something terrible, and for the first time he realized just what he had done. “You took it? From the dead?”
“I... I thought it might have something valuable in it. They’re all dead. It belongs to no one.” But even as he spoke the words he knew he would never convince her.
“That’s looting! It’s like robbing graves, but even worse. Jason, you have to take it back this minute, leave it where you found it.”
“Don’t be silly — how could I do that when the hill’s swarming with people?” It was the first time he had ever raised his voice to her, and he regretted it at once. “I’ll get rid of it, just as soon as I open it up and look inside.”
“Jason, you’re not opening that suitcase! I can’t imagine anything more horrible than pawing about in the belongings of some poor dead creature who was so much alive just an hour ago.”